Different from You: The Promise
by Traitor of All Traitors
Summary: How far would you go to keep a promise to your child? How long can you endure being in a world where monsters exist? And they weren't ones with claws or wings or even the ability to spit fire, but were just regular people that were cruel to you in one way or another. What if you could escape from it all? What if the promise entitled you to escape it all?


Creation began on 11-27-18

Creation ended on 09-17-19

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Different from You: The Promise

A/N: In one sense, "Ikari" may mean "anger" or "rage", but even if used as a name, it shouldn't define anyone as an emotion so negative that it consumes them.

Tokyo-3 had seen better days…if it had better days. Three armored buildings were damaged, but the rest of the city had managed to pull through from the attack made on it yesterday. Still, the paramilitary agency known as NERV…wished it had gone differently a few hours earlier when they answered the call of duty to defend mankind from the second coming of the Angels…and the information they had obtained on certain individuals was more reliable instead of redacted.

"…With what happened last night, I wouldn't be surprised if more people chose to leave," went the faux-blond woman known as Ritsuko Akagi to a woman with purple hair as they evaluated the degree of damage to the city.

"If anything like yesterday continues, there won't be much of a city left to defend," the purple-haired woman responded. "How is Rei doing?"

"At best, she's looking at a month or two in the hospital for her injuries. It's possible she may need to have her spleen and liver replaced."

"And…what of the Third Child? How is he doing?"

That was a rather…touchy and moody subject to bring up now; how could NERV ever properly explain their lack of response time to intercept the Angel to the UN and their inability to do so efficiently…because they tried to get aid from the wrong person that could've helped them…but refused to help them out of personal reasons?

"He's looking at another day in the brig before he's released," Ritsuko answered. "We're still reviewing his file more thoroughly."

"What's there to be more thorough about regarding his background? His file never said that he was kidnapped five years ago, that he was held for ransom for over a week, severely abused by his kidnappers or that he has a daughter with the woman that assaulted him. How does something like that happen and it doesn't get filed? And he doesn't know about NERV or even care much for our situation. What was the point of bringing him here if he was going to say 'no', even when there was a lot at stake?"

"Commander Ikari was confident that he'd listen."

"And look at how wrong he was. More like overconfident, if you ask me."

-x-

Locked up like a criminal…just because he refused to cooperate with his old man. Fourteen-year-old Shinji Ikari, one of Japan's rejects of society, treated like a criminal by his estranged father…simply because he chose not to embrace violence. But Shinji didn't care what he or anyone else thought about his moral compass or lack thereof; if he was asked to keep a promise to his daughter, by his daughter, simply because she was the only one concerned for his feelings, he was bound by something more than blood to keep such a promise, no matter what anyone else thought of him.

"…_You don't frighten me as much as they do…and that's mostly when they look at me, Daddy," _she had explained to him when he found her in the hospital three days ago. _"Please, no matter what happens, promise you won't be like them? The thought of you being anything like them, the people that don't like us at all…is scary. I don't like it when you get angry, even when they're the ones that deserve it."_

And so Shinji had to keep his promise to his only daughter that he wouldn't embrace violence, even if it was used against him; as pathetic as it sounded to be made to promise something like that, he owed it to the only family he had that ever said anything nice to him out of love.

_She knew her son pushed her out onto the street…and protected him while hoping Shado would become nothing more than a memory, _he thought as he sat in the darkness of his cell. _I should be with her right now, not here in some city that's miles away from my little girl._

-x-

"…So, he refused to pilot the Evangelion…simply because he has a bastard daughter that was in an accident…and she made him promise not to be violent…just because violence was inflicted upon her?" A member of the SEELE council questioned Gendo during the next meeting regarding the incident with the Third Angel. "And we're to understand that you, the boy's father, and therefore the girl's grandfather…didn't know of this?"

Gendo, such a cold man and even colder father, responded, "We only knew that he'd been kidnapped, not what had befallen him during the time he was kidnapped."

"It was still your responsibility to see to it that the boy was made aware of what the situation required of him before he arrived," another member of the council informed him. "He should've been informed years ago, not the day before or the day of an attack by the Angels! And we should've been informed of his entire background, including his kidnapping and assault!"

"As well as the aftermath," a third member added in. "This is a serious problem to be troubled with, Ikari. However, since this is your family, no matter how pathetic it currently seems right now, this makes this your problem, your mess. Clean it up before you end up becoming our mess that we need to clean up."

When the meeting ended, Gendo was left pondering how to resolve the matter and get his son to get with the problem.

"…_I don't know what your reason was for telling me to come here, and I honestly don't care," _Shinji had told him during the time in the cage for Unit-01, _"but I promised my daughter I wouldn't embrace violence, no matter what. To want me to fight a creature I know nothing about…is to ask me to go back on my word. If you had time to prepare, then you had time to inform me or someone else of this problem you have before it got worse. The fact that you didn't tells me that you're incompetent of what your job entitles you to do. Get someone else to fight the monster because I will not. You can call me a coward all you want, but if it's between embracing savagery and keeping a promise made to someone that looks up to you…then I choose the latter over the former. This, Father, is your problem, so you deal with it."_

_And you were willing to let everyone die over some ridiculous promise, _Gendo thought, looking down at the picture of Shinji's bastard daughter, Shado, recovering (or barely recovering from the looks of her injuries) in the hospital. _How does a four-year-old get hurt by a bunch of kids playing street hockey? That makes no sense._

"Ikari," went the voice of the sub-commander, Kozo Fuyutsuki to him, "people are starting to question whether or not your son is going to be staying in the brig or will he be allowed to leave, since it's apparent that his priorities are ill-suited to our agency's obligations."

"He'll be released the day after tomorrow," Gendo told him.

"Tell me, did you really not know you had a granddaughter? Or did you even care to keep tabs on your son's care when you left him with those people at all?"

He didn't answer back, but in truth, Gendo just didn't care much for his son's upbringing at all, only that he was alive and able to pilot the Eva. But now that he knew that his son wouldn't, there was no point in caring whether he lived or died; even if his bastard daughter didn't pull through, the boy would still keep his promise to the girl.

_Or will he?_ He wondered.

-x-

She missed her father, and there was no denying it. She felt dislike for her paternal great aunt, uncle and cousin, and it was a fact that the feeling was mutual. The boy had deliberately pushed her out onto the street and watched as the bigger kids tossed her around with those hard sticks like she was the small, dark diskette they were hitting around…and his mother denied his intentions to cause her harm and passed it off as her being clumsy with her ball.

Shado didn't even have a ball to play with. She was waiting on Toya, the only other bastard child of the only friend her father had, Rumiko, when she was purposely pushed into harm's way by the cousin.

"Hey, there," greeted a small boy with brownish-black hair that was shaggy and obscured the left side of his face.

"Hey, Toya," she responded, a bit cheerful to see him visit her.

"I take it that…we're still your only visitors?" She looked back to the door and saw the teenage girl with ebony hair that reached past her shoulders.

"Yes…and the only friendly ones," she told Rumiko.

Her father and these two were the only people that bothered to see her as she made her recovery in the hospital and talk to her. And then her father gets called away by his father to some city miles away from where they resided, Rumiko and Toya kept her company until he got back from what they were hoping was just a brief visit.

"Those three never come to see you?" Toya asked Shado, referring to the other relatives that weren't on her or Shinji's list of nice people.

"No, and…it's actually better that they don't come here to see me," Shado answered. "I don't think the doctors would make them leave if they did come to see me."

"Well, if they're not on the visiting list, it's clear they're not going to bother coming here for you," Rumiko assured her, "and unless they bribed someone here, security would have to make them leave if you don't want to see them."

"They scare me more than the thought of Daddy wanting to hurt them because of what the cousin did to me, which is why I asked him to promise me that he wouldn't be violent."

"He'd be within his right to want to hurt whoever was responsible for hurting you, Shado."

"But then he'd be no better than they are. They just hate us…and they're monsters for is. I don't want Daddy to turn into a monster because the people we live with are monsters. He wouldn't be Daddy if he did, anymore."

"You're not the only two that live with people who are monsters deep down," said Toya to her, referring to how he and his mother had to live with her mother, who was anything but…full of grace. "The worst kinds of monsters are the ones that hide behind masks of compassion and understanding, but show only disgust and shame."

"Is she…still a gorgon?" Shado asked, referring to his grandmother.

"Just…whenever she looks at you like she's angry with you, which is often always with my mother and I," he answered.

"Sometimes, I think it'd be easier on all four of us if we just left where we are."

"And go where, exactly?" Rumiko asked her, only half serious. "People are often always saying that teenagers with children are completely incapable of taking care of them long-term. Not that I'm complaining."

"She complains," Toya reminded her, and she sighed.

"Yeah, she's the only one that does, always saying I'm a bad mother when she's no better."

Rumiko then covered her mouth when she realized what she said in front of them.

"You're a good mother, Rumiko," Shado expressed her opinion. "You're friendly, you're easy to be around and you don't hurt Toya."

"Thank you, Shado," she praised the little girl. "Despite my mistakes, my little boy is the one good thing I ever did right, which makes me sure that when it comes to your father and his past, one of his only mistakes was being born to parents that are never truly there…but you're one of the few good things he ever did with his life."

-x-

"…Excluding his daughter, the Third Child doesn't have much of a social life," Ritsuko explained to Gendo in his office with an updated version of the boy's file. "He only has one childhood friend, a girl named Rumiko Gaidoku, and they both have one thing in common: They both have children as a result of sexual assault, but whereas the boy was kidnapped, her assault, and therefore her unplanned pregnancy with her son, was the result of incest."

"That hardly explains his tiny social circle," Gendo stated.

"Not really a social circle, but more like a thread between the two; according to three nurses that were on call after he was admitted for treatment for his trauma, the girl was the only person that visited him during his recovery, every day, for a month, without fail. Either she was very sympathetic to what he went through out of pity…or she truly cares about him. Even after she found out about his daughter with one of his kidnappers, they still meet to let their children play together so they can talk."

"And what of his aunt and uncle? Where were they during all of this?"

"That's…a sour point. They spent as little time with him as possible, even after he was returned from his kidnapping. A quote recorded from the aunt goes down as, _'I just make sure that he has a roof over his, that doesn't make me his mother. Anything else is up to him. Let him navigate through life like his parents did, if he even can'_. As a result, it looks like the Third Child doesn't have much trust in anyone older than him unless they're bound by medical oaths. When the police finally found him, he actually attacked one of them with a glass shard out of anger; apparently, it was the same policeman that suspected him of stealing a bike when he was eight years old the year before he was kidnapped."

"And what is your professional opinion regarding the boy's use to NERV after fully reviewing his file?"

"Professionally, he's not mentally stable for use as an Evangelion pilot for NERV, no matter what we try with him. And personally, he has no reason to want anything to do with any of his family beyond his daughter, who seems to serve as his emotional pillar that keeps his moral compass pointing as straight as possible for him. He'd rather do right by her more than anything else for someone else."

"And what of the girl that's his daughter? What of this…Fuyona?"

"First up, he had her name changed to 'Shado' after learning her mother put no effort in naming her before she died in prison, as the original name meant 'unwanted'. He felt that 'Shado' had a more-meaningful feel; instead of being an unwanted child, she became his shadow, someone he couldn't walk away from. At present, she's in the hospital recovering from several bruises, a fractured left leg and a mild concussion caused by being a victim of street hockey kids."

"How did this happen?"

"The girl claims the cousin pushed her out onto the street, but the mother claims she was just being clumsy while playing ball, but according to the Third Child, the girl doesn't have a ball or any other toys to play with. The only thing listed as a desired plaything is a stuffed bear. Could we be looking at attempted murder on the family's part?"

"Maybe… If the girl had died, the Third Child would likely be easier to manipulate, as he'd have no further reason to refuse not to pilot."

"Except we don't know for sure if he would pilot if something of the sort happened to her."

And it wasn't as though they could seek the services of the other teen parent, either; Rumiko was born the day before Second Impact, not only a year older than the Third Child, but virtually useless to NERV as a potential candidate for the Evangelion program due to her mother being alive. If she had been a year younger or born a day after Second Impact and her mother listed as deceased, things would've been different for NERV regarding her.

-x-

In the still darkness, Shinji thought about the three people currently in his life that actually mattered to him above all others. There was his daughter, his childhood friend and her son. Sometimes, it seemed as though they were the only ones that actually understood one another and didn't have it out for anyone that wasn't out to get them out of contempt or some form of spite. Other times, it seemed like they were stuck in a rut because they lived with people that didn't hide the fact that they hated their guts to the point of abuse, emotional or physical.

_If there is a God, he hates people that have no future, _he thought every once in a while.

"_If there is a God, she doesn't do her job very well,"_ Rumiko had once told him of her opinion of the infallible deity. _"Or rather, she stopped doing her job and let others do it for her while she simply watches. I don't hate her for that, though. I simply hate that that's all she chooses to do. Whoever said that she was infallible, I doubt that because nobody is these days…or weeks…or have been for years…except those that actually want to be."_

And then, when he closed his eyes for just a moment, he felt as though he had drifted elsewhere…because he was seeing himself somewhere that wasn't a prison cell. It looked like a forest shrouded in mist, both mystifying and beautiful.

"What is this place?" He wondered.

"A forest beyond the scope of your perception," he heard a woman say to him from behind, "and just one of many places you wouldn't find today because they don't exist, anymore. Forests with trees as big as cities, lakes as wide as the skies are vast and mountains that contain treasures so great that they can bestow generations of nobility to even the smallest peasant on the street. People dare to defy as often as they dare to change their world. Except with the world you live in, there isn't much left to change…except how it ends."

Shinji turned around and saw a young woman with long, amber-colored hair and dressed in a flowing, pink dress, with eyes as white as one could be when rendered blind. She was sitting on a large rock, holding a staff with six rings dangling from the large ring on top of it.

"Who are you?" He asked her.

"I have been called by many names," she responded. "I am deviance… I am escape… I am freedom… I am guidance and I am fortune. And most importantly, I am here to talk to you about your fate."

"My fate?"

"Well, yours and the people that matter to you. Don't you ever feel like the end is approaching? Don't you ever worry that the next day you spend with your daughter, your only childhood friend and her son…may very well be your last day with them?"

"Sometimes…but it's nothing I have any control over."

"You believe that parents and guardians are supposed to make the world you live in a better place for their children and their children's children, do you not?"

"I do."

"But the people you live with, the mother of your friend and her son live with, they make you feel as though the world you live in is not getting any better, don't they?"

"Yeah…they do…all the time."

"Despite your own contempt towards them, you keep to yourself because you love your daughter, who loves you in return and views your presence as the only good thing she's ever known and fears your absence above all else. What if you were to learn that the world you four live in is going to get worse before this year ends and everything you know, everyone you cherish, will be taken away from you by people that want to see it all go bye-bye in the snap of one's fingers? How would you respond to that?"

"I'd… I'd want to be with Shado, Rumiko and Toya. I'd just want to tell them that I care for them more than anything."

"And…if you four could escape such a fate by simply going somewhere else beyond the realm of fact and across the vastness of perception?"

"I'd want to know what the repercussions would be for them if I made a choice they didn't want me to make for them. As a father, I have to be responsible for my daughter. I can't be responsible for everyone else."

Then, the woman smiled and took one of the rings on her staff off and took something off it.

"The father, symbolized as the man that looks out for his child or children and wants only for them to be happy," she said, and then tossed the object from the ring at him. "You represent devotion and a protective instinct, despite having promised your daughter that you wouldn't use violence. Your strength is bound to be in many forms as you protect those that matter to you for benevolent reasons."

Catching the object, Shinji looked at it and found that it was some sort of gem. It resembled a Taoist symbol, but was completely blue, with the two smaller circles a darker shade of blue.

"Keep it," the woman told him. "You'll know what to do with it when the time comes."

Before he could say anything else, he realized that he was back inside his cell.

"I must be going crazy," he considered, but then felt something in his left hand and opened it. "Or not crazy at all."

It was the gem from the dream or whatever it was where he saw the woman, as real as he was right now. He quickly put it in his pants' left pocket and waited for someone to come let him out of this place so he could return to his daughter.

_I'll be with you, Shado,_ he thought.

-x-

Shado hated these nights spent in the hospital. Her father wasn't around to tell her another crazy story he had to make up just to keep her entertained, tuck her in or just be nearby. Even with a small light nearby, the darkness worried her because of who could be hiding in the shadows, not what like a monster; when people did things to other people that were cold and hurtful, that's when they lost any right to be viewed as people and became the very monsters children are told exist in the world. And there were monsters that walked among people that others didn't seem to realize were there because they blended in so well.

_Of course, not everyone sees them,_ she thought, looking up at the ceiling as sleep eluded her. _They wouldn't see them unless they were being harmed by them. They can be anywhere, anyone…and the only way to avoid becoming like them is to not embrace violence. The moment you do, it's only by a miracle that you can go back to being yourself and not a monster._

-x-

Rumiko, after putting Toya to sleep, sat on the front porch outside her mother's house trying to think about something other than how right Shado and Shinji were about how people were monsters when they chose to hurt others. But that was easier said than done. Easier to imagine people with horns, tentacles, demon wings or razor-sharp claws, but those were no better than costumes or pictures when they only hid how they were on the inside. Her mother was probably the least of the monsters she knew from her past, since her father and brother were the first ones she had seen…and this was back when she was innocent, when she was naïve and knew nothing of what they were doing was wrong. But when they were found out and she pointed the finger at them, her perception changed and her relationship with her family degraded; it was a love-hate bond with her mother because she didn't want to know who her son's father is, for better or for worse…simply because she was afraid of the truth.

_And the fact that I don't want to know makes me a bad mother,_ she thought; even if she didn't want to know if it was her father or brother, she wasn't doing Toya any favors by not letting him know who it was, no matter how much it hurt. _I mean, if it's my father, that means Toya's my half-brother along with being my son, but if it's my brother, then he's also my nephew. I'd rather just keep it as him being my son and nothing beyond that._

But her mother, who clearly loved and hated her grandson because she didn't know which man was partly responsible for him and couldn't without her consent, which wasn't going to happen, took out this frustration over not knowing on her daughter by hitting her every once in a while, earning her the silent designation of a gorgon; it wasn't because she had a look that could kill if given the chance, but because every time she hit her daughter, it was like getting hit with stones.

"A world of monsters," she sighed. "Why can't we be living in a world of people?"

-x-

The door to his cell slid open and let the light in, blinding Shinji as he covered his eyes.

"Aaurgh!" He groaned, hearing footsteps.

"Okay, Shinji Ikari," a man said to him, "you're free to leave."

Shinji got up and stepped out of the cell, relieved to be a free man. As he was being led down a hall to the exit, he noticed several people looked at him rather coldly, probably because he refused to help them with their monster problem. But it was actually on them to handle the monsters, not him. If they couldn't do their job, it was their fault.

-x-

"The Third Child has left the city," Ritsuko informed Gendo in his office. "Are you sure it was wise to let him go?"

"At this point, he made himself clear that he won't raise his hands in violence," Gendo responded. "It's during cases like this that predictability is expected when people are cornered."

"The Marduk Institute hasn't located a potential candidate for the Fourth Child position, and the Second Child was…is still preoccupied."

"Accelerate Rei's recovery. Until the Second Child arrives and we find the Fourth Child, we'll have to rely upon her."

"If worse comes to worst, we can always bring the boy back and brainwash him…but then we wouldn't know what he'd do or how he'd react if we were effective."

-x-

"…Are you sure you should be trying to walk on that leg of yours, Shado?" Toya asked the little girl as she was trying to walk unaided by a small crutch.

"I'm tired of lying down and eating that hospital food that doesn't taste right," Shado responded to her friend as she held onto a sidebar on the wall, taking baby steps in her recovery. "I want to be able to walk out of here when Daddy comes back."

Rumiko, standing beside the wall in case Shado lost her balance, uttered, "You do know that he'd carry you in his arms if you couldn't walk. He'd just want you to be safe and happy."

"So long as we live with those monsters," the girl explained, "there's no such thing as safe for either of us. They're like gremlins…or oni, always hurting Daddy or I with cold words. What their boy did to me, what they let him do, that only makes them worse than ever. And if they let him do it once already… Who's to say that they'll let him try again and call it an accident?"

"I'd keep you away from those people by leaving to go someplace else if I knew where we could live without someone wanting to stir up trouble," they heard Shinji say to her, surprising them with his presence by the door to the room.

"You're finally back," said Rumiko to him. "How was Tokyo-3? There was nothing about it on the news beyond some craziness that was reported in Tokyo-2 and…how something exploded over there."

"My father… That man…wanted me to operate a giant, mechanical monster to fight another giant monster that showed up to attack," he revealed to them; he was under no obligation to lie about what happened while he was away. "But I told him I couldn't because of a promise I made to my daughter not to use violence."

"How'd he take it?" Toya asked.

"He had me thrown into a holding cell because I refused for a while before he let me go earlier today. This whole agency he worked at was displeased with my decision to refuse, but I stressed that my promise to Shado meant more to me than their situation, and it was that man's fault if they didn't inform me way before the monster attacked or had me trained."

"So," Rumiko stated, "your old man's plan to get rid of a creature that nobody knows about…was a gambit that involved you operating a giant robot that you never saw before…or had any practice with operating? He sounds like a wannabe-master of the monsters that walk among us, not satisfied with anyone who doesn't bend for him."

"I know that I won't see him, ever again…but because of my brief visit to that city…I know exactly where I stand in his life: Nowhere."

Shado felt sad for her father; to have no place in anyone's life was to not belong anywhere in that life. In many respects, this was the drawback of his, hers, even Rumiko and Toya's lives if there were people that hated them, saw them as problems that needed to be dealt with, or just wanted nothing to do with them like how certain stories or films showed how people were supposed to get along.

"What is it, Shado?" Shinji spoke to his daughter.

"Daddy, I…I…"

"What's wrong, sweetie?" He asked her, wanting to know.

"Daddy, I don't…want to go back to that house with those monsters in it," she answered. "I don't trust them not to try to hurt us again."

"I don't want us to go back to them, either."

"It's not like any of us have anywhere else to go," Rumiko stated to the pair. "Where can any of us go…when it seems like the whole world has a target on our backs?"

"Except we don't live in the world," Toya corrected his mother. "We just live in a small area in Japan, which is probably the worst place to be for us right now with the monsters that exist here. Oni, gorgons, wraiths, sirens, all a few blocks away from us, a few miles away from us…or just waiting outside this room to get us."

"Sometimes, I have to wonder when my gorgon will cease her viciousness and just cut to the chase over me."

Shinji then put his hand into his pocket and felt for the stone he was given during that strange, sojourn meeting he had with that mysterious woman.

"What if we just up and left right now?" He spoke. "We just leave this town, this whole country…and never look back?"

"If I ran and took Toya with me," Rumiko stated over his suggestion, "I'd probably be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life…and risk my son being taken from me. The same would apply to you, as well, Shinji."

"Even if I did stay, what's to stop those…people Shado and I live with…from trying something worse than what their son attempted to do to her…and when she never did anything to them?"

Rumiko knew, of course, that Shinji was right; his relatives, all save for his daughter, were likely to try something else just to get rid of Shado and make it look like a mishap that wasn't their fault. Or worse, make it look like Shinji was at fault, make him seem like an incompetent parent when all he does is everything he can to put a smile on the little girl's face. And then, there was her mother…and what she'd do to herself or Toya if she was in the mood.

_Instability, _she thought in realization. _We live with unstable people that are monsters and that hate us and our children with every fiber of their being…and they won't make small qualms about trying to put us in the ground like worms trying to avoid getting plucked by avian fiends. If it's not today they'll do it, then it's likely tomorrow, the day after…or at some point in the future, putting our very lives in danger. We'd have to be looking over our shoulders every so often…and keeping one eye open…just to go to sleep at night._

"I don't wanna be eaten by my gorgon grandmother," said Toya to his mother.

"I don't wanna be tossed around again by giant flesh-eaters," Shado added to her father.

-x-

In all honesty, she was relieved that she didn't see either of them come back yesterday. Her nephew was always nothing but trouble, being her sister's child, and then he had to go and have a child of his own. It would've been better if he gotten sick and died, not to be kidnapped and later raped by a woman old enough to be his own mother, but the fates forced this foolishness on her when her sister died and her widowed husband dumped their mess on her family. So yes, she was relieved when neither the boy nor his daughter returned yesterday; it felt like a weight had been removed from her shoulders as she sat down and drank her morning coffee as the new day started.

"Any idea of where those could be?" Her husband asked as he drank his coffee.

"Don't know, don't care," she responded.

Ding-dong! The doorbell rang, disturbing their peace.

"He probably forgot his key again," the husband sighed as he got up to answer the door.

The wife had to silently swear that one of these days was one where she was just going to throw the boy out onto the street after sending his child to go live in an orphanage out of his reach.

"Nikki Gaidoku?" She heard her husband expressed. "What brings you here this morning?"

She got up to see the other woman that was the mother of that girl her nephew was friends with and the mother of that boy that was either fathered by her father or her brother, seeing that she was anything but making a social call to them.

"I apologize for intruding on your day, but did either your nephew or grandniece come home last night?" Nikki asked them.

"No, they didn't," the husband answered. "Probably up and left after meeting his father and left his kid in the hospital."

"No, that's unlikely. I called the hospital, and they said my daughter's friend left with his daughter after he came to get her. This was after I found out that Rumiko and Toya never came home last night. It's forty minutes after ten in the evening, and does anyone know where their children are?"

"As long as the boy and his brat are out of our way, I could care less for where they might be."

"Tell me, has either of them mentioned anything about…monsters among people? Or…monsters masquerading as people that love to harm them?"

"We just look at it as a game they can't stop playing," the wife told her.

"Well, all I know is that sometimes, I get labeled a gorgon and you, your husband and son are labeled as oni or gremlins or some other type of creature. I don't know why, but it may have something to do with how they perceive us most of the time."

"That snot-nosed… I'm calling Social Services on him. He's clearly an incompetent parent to an incompetent child." The husband declared; he was only offended that his nephew up and labeled him and his family as a bunch of monsters.

"Good luck finding them, then," Nikki expressed. "Do you have any idea where they could've run off to; assuming my daughter and grandson ran off with them?"

"They're two teenage parents with two four-year-old bastards and no money," the wife expressed. "They can't get very far. And they have no means to get around. It's probably just a game they're playing. They can't stay away for long."

"Are you sure about that? Six times after I found out Rumiko got knocked up by either my husband or my son, she tried to hide from me for over a week. She barely hid for two days, always hiding in your nephew's little wooden shack you had made to keep him out of your house most of the time."

The study they had made for Shinji had resembled more of a small house meant to keep him out of theirs for a while. And after he had become a father, it had become the only place where he felt the little girl was safe from other people. Mostly his cousin, who almost dropped the girl during his only attempt at holding her, not that it was unintentional. And as they checked around the little house-like study, there was no indication that Shinji and Shado had returned to this space at all yesterday. The only indication that they ever spent time here, aside from the two small futons and the stack of books Shinji had read in order to understand how to be a parent, was a small picture that had been hand-drawn of four people, two older and two smaller.

"Does your grandson draw?" The wife asked Nikki as she showed her the picture.

"Not that I know of," she answered. "Your grandniece probably made it with Rumiko's aide."

"Hard to believe that that girl would be able to draw a picture of herself, her father, your daughter and her son like they were some family of their own."

But the drawing seemed to indicate that the four were akin to a family, only the two parent teens weren't seeing one another and the bastard children were hardly seen as little angels if they were the products of ill unions by two children with people older than they had been.

"I seriously doubt that they could've gotten very far," the wife repeated, tossing the drawing back into the little house.

-x-

Gendo's plan to make his son pilot the Eva was to have his daughter removed from his care and sent to parts unknown, but this update put a cramp in his scenario; he didn't anticipate of his son and granddaughter to go missing for over a month! This hindered him from making full use of Unit-01 so long as he couldn't exploit his son. Not only that, but he heard that his childhood friend and her son were likely missing with them, and there was no update on either pair anywhere in the country! Where could they have run off to at a time like this when the world was at stake?!

"_Sir, how exactly are we supposed to find this boy and his daughter?" _Gendo had been asked by one the Section Two agents. _"We don't even know anything about them. His file is bare of anything useful. There's no record of places he would frequent, no other contacts with people, not even a damn list of places he'd like to go on a vacation to if he could! His file, it's practically useless! You'd have to talk to someone that actually knows him to find him!"_

And the worst thing of it was that the agent was right. If NERV were to find Shinji and his daughter, they would've had to get the information from someone that knew him…and there wasn't a soul in the country that could provide such information. No other friends, no shred of information could be afforded by the aunt and uncle, not even Mrs. Gaidoku could fill in the gaps. If the two teens and their children had run off, they had the advantage of being virtually unknown to the world.

What little information there was on the quartet was distributed across Japan; it was assumed they hadn't left the nation in the time they had gone missing, and there was no report or call of a ransom being demanded like before with Shinji when he had been kidnapped. If the latter were the case, then, if they had been kidnapped by someone, they were likely disinterested in some financial gain scam.

"_So, you'd just run away from your responsibility to the world like the coward you are?" _Gendo had called Shinji out before he left the base. _"You disappoint me. It's likely that we'll never meet after this day."_

"_For the sake of my daughter, I pray that we never see each other again,"_ Shinji had responded to him and left without so much as a wave of his hand or a slight in hesitation.

_Where did you run off to? _Gendo wondered as he sat in his office, his desk occupied by the limited information on the Third Child; for the first time in his life, the cold and indifferent father wished he had some hint to the whereabouts of where the boy had gone.

-x-

It was just one attempt, just one in order to get away after he showed them the stone…and he wouldn't use it, assuming it did anything for them, unless they all agreed to it…and Shinji was relieved that they were able to do the one thing they wanted to do, which was to get away from the monsters in their lives. The stone had opened a portal for them and they took only what they had on them, leaving everything and everyone else behind.

"Shinji," he heard Rumiko speak to him as he looked around their new setting, a rather simple city by the water that had more trees around its buildings than the small town they used to reside in. "Shinji, are you okay?"

He returned his gaze to his friend and their children at the table they were sitting around and gave a small smile.

"Yeah," he answered her. "I'm okay now."

They had to think of the same destination to go to, which was a place devoid of monsters of all kinds, including the ones where it was just people that were sometimes cruel to those that had either done no wrong to warrant such malevolence towards them or were taken advantage over by other's darker desires, and they ended up in another universe where there was no such thing as giant monsters, where the world hadn't been maimed by a grand disaster or where people were simply cruel for the sake of being cruel to people. And there were seasons to look forward to, like winter or spring, seasons that the universe they used to reside in were no longer present in Japan, just perpetual summertime, which no longer had any relevance to the four.

"Daddy," went Shado, who looked better now that she was able to walk on her own, and holding a stuffed bear that Shinji had gotten her three days ago, "no regrets?"

"None at all," he responded.

This was their life now. There was no way they were going back to that other universe where they had suffered. There were no absentee parents, no uncaring aunts or uncles, abusive mothers, advantage-taking fathers or elder siblings, nothing and nobody that could hurt them. All around them were just…regular people without any sense of those problems they had to get away from.

But Shinji did have to wonder every now and then if they weren't the only ones that had escaped from their former lives, if there were others around that had met the woman he had, and whether or not they were either here or some other alternate universe that existed across the vastness of perception and possibility. Maybe there were, maybe there weren't.

_It feels like a terrible weight has been lifted from my soul, _he thought as took another bite out of his French toast. _I feel no need or desire to want to hurt people that have done nothing to Shado or myself. I feel like my relationship with Rumiko might get better because the four of us are living together. So, in a sense, I've kept my promise to Shado that I wouldn't become like the monsters we used to live with. I hope we get to live each day without this dread that no longer hangs over our heads or in our hearts._

Unbeknownst to the young quartet, the same lady that had offered Shinji the stone to relocate them all here to this new universe stood in an alleyway, watching with a proud smile over how they were among the few that had gotten away from the undesired fate that would've ended their lives had they stayed in the one that promised nothing but tears and heartache. She, too, was hoping that with each new day, they'd be able to enjoy their lives with fulfillment instead of having to dread every possibility that the people that hurt them would just find a way to hurt them further.

_Good luck in your new life, you four, _she thought…and then vanished from sight.

A promise made…and a promise kept

A/N: I think stories like this will be part of a chain because with these three original characters, Shado, Rumiko and Toya, there is a sense of stability and familiar association for Shinji that rarely exists for him in other works, like _My Special Keeper_ where he is a part of a family of people different backgrounds all associated to one person that cares for them more than blood ties ever could. Plus, Shado's got much influence over Shinji, being a child that loves him and makes him want to be a better person.


End file.
